BIO 115: Environmental Biology

In Tipping Point for Planet Earth, world-renowned scientists Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly explain the growing threats to humanity as the planet edges toward resource wars for remaining space, food, oil, and water. And as they show, these wars are not the nightmares of a dystopian future, but are already happening today. Finally, they ask: at what point will inaction lead to the break-up of the intricate workings of the global society? The planet is in danger now, but the solutions, as Barnosky and Hadly show, are still available. We still have the chance to avoid the tipping point and to make the future better. But this window of opportunity will shut within ten to twenty years.

What if what we think we know about ecology and environmental policy is just wrong? What if environmental laws often make things worse? What if the very idea of nature has been hijacked by politics? What if wilderness is something we create in our minds, as opposed to being an actual description of nature?

..Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.

For more than a decade, Rezneat Darnell worked on this major synthesis of what is known about the Gulf of Mexico. His goal: to bring a deeper understanding of "the American Sea" to students, scientists, managers, and educated citizens of the public at large. The American Sea builds on Darnell's own research, the research of his graduate students, government agency research reports, data synthesis reports, and literature summaries to present a holistic view of the Gulf of Mexico. Although he is recognized as a pioneer in the study of continental shelf ecology, Darnell largely resisted specialization, remaining throughout his career "the writer and bringer together of things." Here, he has written a book that embraces history, geology, geography, meteorology, chemistry, biology, ecology, and human relations in one comprehensive reference...